by Sheri Holman
We found the darkest corner of the barn and I balanced the projector on an old crate and we watched the short film all the way through. It was remarkably well preserved, considering. When it was over, we sat quietly breathing in the dark, neither of us moving, until I rose to light the lantern we’d brought to lead us there. I struck the match and raised the wick and when I turned around, he was pulling his T-shirt up over his flat stomach, just scraping the peaks of his pink, erect nipples. For a moment he was as headless as the conductor by the railroad tracks, nothing but gooseflesh of white torso and dimple of armpit. The backs of his arms were a constellation of freckles and then his shirt dropped to the floor and his eyes held mine, as still as mountain rock at dusk. He didn’t take those cliff-side eyes off of me as he reached down and unzipped the fly of his jeans and wriggled out of them and his underwear at the same time. Women’s clothes drop away, they are soft folds at the feet like a pool of water. Men’s clothes are hard and sit up at angles and must be stepped out of gracelessly. He did, darling. The barn was wide and smelled of damp hay. The lantern flame leaped against his gorgeous penis high against his belly. It was large and perfect and reaching out for me. It knew, and mine knew, too, and it hurt so bad. I wanted that hurting to go on forever. In that moment he was neither a son nor a lover to me. He was like food. I wanted to eat him alive, I was so hungry. I didn’t even know how starved I’d been until then. And yet to taste him would mean the end of everything. Your mother. You. Me as I had always been. Most of all, him.
If you could have just left him at the station, I wrote your mother all those years later, I could have handled it. But you invited him into our house. And you did it to please me when I was trying to protect you by keeping him away. Maybe, Ann, I owe you thanks after all for that, too, the fall of our family.
Tell me what I am, Eddie, he said. Tell me why you brought me home.
I glanced at the lantern, casting its soft light over his naked body. He was shivering uncontrollably, even as he tried to stand still. I thought I should warm him, I thought maybe it would be best to smash the lantern and let the flame catch up the barn and the barn catch up the night and burn us both alive. Better to burn now than later, I actually thought.
Instead, I told him he was confused and that he’d misunderstood my affection for him. I told him he missed his father and that the feelings he had toward me were just that, love he would have given to his father if his father had still been alive. I told him I loved him as my son and I would be so happy if he wanted to stay with us past the summer. I told him I knew you and he liked each other and that it was okay, these things happen between boys and girls, no harm done.
I turned and left, I couldn’t look back to see those eyes. I didn’t know how I could ever look into those eyes again, having lied so hard in telling the truth. I went to my room and shut the door and lay on the sofa, not daring to undress. The fire had died down to ruby coals and ash, the chill of the night had crept inside. For the next few hours I replayed every day of the last year, all the jokes and conversations and lunches, all the skits and odd jobs and backslaps. Most of all I replayed the day after Ann had led me to his room—the one she had prepared without my knowledge—when I stopped him in the hallway at the station. I’ve noticed you haven’t been going to school, you’ve been here almost every day, I said. I was on my own at your age, I know how hard it is. You’re a special kid, I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. God, Eddie, you’ve given me so much already, he said. And I couldn’t think of a thing I’d done except take him out to lunch a few times and listen. And share my own story. I had begun a conversation I could not finish. He had misunderstood. He had understood better than I knew. He stood naked before me.
I closed my eyes to shut it out. I couldn’t not see. I could never not see again as long as I lived. I squeezed them tighter. It’s not my fault. I never. I wouldn’t. I said all the words but I knew I had and I could. I opened my eyes.
The room was flooded with light.
I leaped from the sofa, flicked the switch he had wired. Off, on, off. You were up, too, the bare bulb in your room glaring. The kitchen, the porch, all the fixtures ablaze. You threw open your door as I raced past, shouting at you to stay where you were. I don’t know if I’d ever even raised my voice at you before; you shrank back afraid. I ran across the porch to the backyard where, lucky for me, the light from the windows made the dark of the yard even darker and, not seeing, I tripped over the taut electric cable, falling hard on my face. I didn’t have time to feel pain, I was so grateful I’d found the magic thread that would lead me to him. I groped along the ground, following the wire in and out of trees, through the crevices of rock, around blind corners of forest to the path we walked to and from the car. The hearse was still there, hunkering in the dark. Its back gate hung open and I climbed inside, certain I would find him curled up asleep in there as Ann sometimes took the couch after a nasty spat. The hearse was empty and I cursed myself, because in checking, I had lost the thread. Furiously, I felt along the ground, over roots and stone and dully glowing green mushroom, until at last my fingers tangled in it. The cable plunged back into the woods, weaving its way into the denser dark where the moon beat vainly upon the canopy. I went in after it, my fingers numb from running along its length, my back screaming from bending down tracing its path. It dropped off precipitously and from the rise above, I saw the road directly below, the spent spool, moonlight playing along the electrical wires overhead, snagging on the dangling jumper cables that he had taken from the hearse. Stray blue arcs still leaped between the makeshift circuit he’d used to complete the busted transformer. I shouted his name and crashed down the hill to where he lay, thrown from the pole with the shock of connection. I knew he must be dead when I pulled his limp body onto the shoulder of the road and cradled him in my lap.
Jasper, oh, God, Jasper, oh, God, oh …
His jeans, his shirt, everything back in place as if it never happened. Maybe it never did. Maybe he never happened. An orphaned boy at the station who appeared and disappeared, just a troubled dream in the middle of a long life. Did I want him to be over, like a nightmare I could forget? Was that why I had brought him here? To get rid of him once and for all? But with a long, deep shiver, like my mother used to say, someone walking across your grave, his chest moved beneath my hand. His lips parted, his eyes fluttered and opened. He looked up at me, shocked back into being a boy again, not that thing he’d been in the barn. He lowered his head so that I couldn’t see his shame and I knew then he would live. I thought I had known gratitude when I was shown my first movie. I thought I knew it when I met my wife, when I received my Christmas bonuses, when I found you in the woods. Before that night I had never known the meaning of the word, it had been as empty to me as the word fear had been before I embraced the fear of letting myself love you, Wallis, my child.
“Did it work?” Jasper asked. I nodded over him, my tears wetting his hair.
On my life, Ann, I wrote your mother all those years later. That was the only time I held him.
Wallis
1980
All the lights are on at home when the hearse pulls into the carport. Through the sliding glass door, Wallis sees Mom sitting at the kitchen table in her buttercup quilted bathrobe, the one Wallis picked out and Eddie paid for last Mother’s Day. By this time of night, Mom is usually nestled in bed with a library book. She keeps the television on in her bedroom and reads with the volume down until Eddie presents the weather and then, from her own bedroom, Wallis will hear her turn it up until her father is done, then turn it off. She has moved the television from her dresser in the bedroom to the kitchen counter. The volume must be turned up pretty loud for her not to hear the tires on the driveway. Or she hears and just doesn’t want to turn around.
Eddie slides open the door and drags in the cooler packed with uneaten groceries. Wallis and Jasper linger in the car, gathering the fast-food wrappers and empty soda cans from the long trip, neither of
them wanting to go in next. They haven’t spoken about what happened. When her father disappeared into the woods after Jasper, Wallis waited alone in her grandmother’s house for over an hour, wondering how much longer she would need to sit until someone came to tell her they were both dead, her mother was on her way. Finally Eddie staggered across the yard leading Jasper to the kitchen to wash the dirt from his knees and elbows. Jasper had a dazed, dreamy look about him as if he were sleepwalking through it all, and when Eddie sent him out to the spring to wash the leaves from his hair, Wallis thought she would get her explanation at last. About the barn and the movie, about the lights and their disappearance. But all her father had said after Jasper left was, Pack your things. We’re going home in the morning.
In the kitchen, Mom tilts her cheek so that Dad can kiss it. She doesn’t get up but looks over her shoulder to assure herself Wallis is there. Jasper is climbing out of the hearse with his rucksack and the old projector, and Wallis sees the flicker in her mother’s eyes as if she’d hoped, somehow, Eddie had let him loose by the side of the road like one of those dogs they sometimes find at gas stations. Wallis slides her suitcase out of the back and follows Jasper inside.
“Your mail is on the counter,” Mom is saying to Dad. An open envelope purposefully left on top of the pile is addressed: Attention Shareholder.
“I understand they’re selling the station,” she says.
“So it’s done?” Eddie asks, trying to sound casual.
“Seems like.”
“Things change, Ann,” Eddie says. “It’ll work out.”
Mom nods but says nothing. Her father drags the cooler to the refrigerator. It sloshes with melted ice and he has to dry each item with a paper towel before he puts it away. Wallis watches him wipe down the mayonnaise, the two remaining cans of beer, wrapped ground beef. Water has gotten into the marshmallows and he throws them away. She glances at the program Mom has been watching. It’s the news about the hostages in Iran that started coming on after the regular news.
“I’m going to bed,” Jasper says.
“Good night,” replies Ann politely.
“What time should we be up in the morning?” he asks Eddie.
Her father looks up from the cooler. “I’m going in alone tomorrow. I was going to ask Ann to register you for school. They’ll need time to transfer your records.”
“I told you I’m not going back to school,” Jasper says reflexively. Wallis can’t believe he would argue at a time like this. He can’t even see how angry her mother is.
“Good night, son,” Eddie says.
Jasper snatches up his duffel bag and pushes past Wallis. He stops at the bottom of the stairs and she thinks he is about to turn around to continue the fight, but he doesn’t. He takes the stairs up to his bedroom as if his sack were full of boulders instead of a change of clothes.
“When you go in tomorrow,” Mom says, “you should know I told them you had a ministroke and were ordered to rest. Those flowers on the windowsill are from John and the crew.”
“You told them what?” Eddie asks.
Mom looks away from the television. “I told them that’s why you were late for your party. That’s why you were behaving so oddly and why you couldn’t come to work.”
Now her father is as angry as her mother. Wallis looks at the bouquet of roses and carnations that have started to go brown at the edges from the heat, and the big dopey Get Well card with its dozens of signatures.
“What did you do that for?” he snaps.
“I had to tell them something, didn’t I? When you didn’t show up? When they called the house? I had to lie and pretend I knew they were selling my own father’s station when they said how sorry they were. You are my husband. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Mom is on her feet in her bright yellow bathrobe. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days or washed her hair or moved from this spot. Except that the kitchen is clean and the mail is sorted and all the plants in their beds outside are watered and weeded.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” Eddie says at last.
“Bullshit,” says Mom. “You’re a goddamned coward.”
They have both forgotten Wallis is there, and Wallis doesn’t move. Her parents have always bickered so they wouldn’t have to fight. But it is nearly impossible for her to remember what any of them used to do before Jasper came. On the small television, tinny theme music plays and that red-faced man with the big hair is saying it’s Day 288 for the hostages and their families.
“Where did you even take them?” Mom demands.
“We went to the mountains,” Eddie says.
“Not to that shack?”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Wallis breaks in. She can see her dad needs help. “Dad and Jasper are fixing it up. They’re wiring it for electricity so we can all go back in the fall.”
“Themselves?” Mom asks as if Eddie were not in the room. He lifts the cooler and dumps the dirty water down the sink. He turns it over to dry and wipes his hands carefully on a dish towel.
“It’s been a long day,” says Eddie calmly. “I’m going to bed, too. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
Dad doesn’t try to kiss Mom again and she doesn’t acknowledge his departure, but waits until she hears him on the stairs before speaking again.
“Did you at least have fun?” she asks grimly.
“I’m sorry we didn’t call,” Wallis says. “Dad went to town, I thought he would.”
Mom sits back down and Wallis feels she should sit with her, she wants to be close to her now that she’s felt what it’s like to be so far away. Mom spreads her hands on the white Formica table as if trying to read a Ouija board.
“The first day you were gone, when I didn’t hear from you,” she says, “I unfolded all our driving maps and ran my fingers up and down the whole East Coast hoping they’d somehow know and stop where you were. I knew, in my gut, that he’d taken you there, but I told myself he wouldn’t. He was responsible, a grown man. I almost got in my car and drove all the way to that old house. I didn’t though. Even though I knew. I told myself he wouldn’t.”
“We didn’t think you’d be worried,” Wallis lies.
“I had the maps out,” Mom continues. “So I made a list of all the smaller cities with network affiliates within three hundred miles of here. I wrote them down, see.” She reaches for a list under the phone book on the counter. On it is a list of names inked in blue and beside them call letters. The list is not very long.
“There are almost no independent stations left and when I phoned them, I found out most of them were in the process of phasing out their weathermen anyway. They were looking for meteorologists, whatever those are, as if you needed to be a scientist to read the weather. I was so alone, I kept the TV on all the time just for company. And that man kept counting down the hostages’ lives: Day 285, Day 286, 87, 88. You know, when the shah died a few weeks ago, I really thought they would release them. The reason for holding them was over. But no, they just found something else they wanted—the shah’s assets, they said—and I thought, Ann, people will always find a reason to hold on to what they have until they find something they want more. Then they’ll let go, just like that.”
“I’m sorry,” Wallis says, wanting to cry. “It’s all my fault.”
Mom looks up and sees her for the first time since she’s come home. She opens her arms and Wallis buries her face in the quilted yellow satin that smells of margarine and pancake syrup.
“It’s not your fault,” Mom says, squeezing her too tight. “I wish I knew who to blame.”
Wallis endures the prolonged hug and gently frees herself.
“It’s late,” says her mother. “You need to be in bed, too. If you want back-to-school clothes, we should go tomorrow while they’re still on sale.”
Wallis nods and takes up her suitcase that she left by the door. Her mother is not watching TV anymore but she makes no move to turn it off. Instead she pulls a vial of pills from her deep po
cket, shakes two into her hand, and swallows them dry. Wallis has never seen her take anything stronger than vitamin C.
“Something to help me sleep,” she says when she catches Wallis staring. “I got them on Day 287, which was my own Day 3.”
Wallis takes the stairs to her room. Plenty of women need help, Mom’s doctor would have reassured her, had Mom bothered to ask. If she hadn’t driven miles out of her way to the new, bright, chain pharmacy so that the pharmacist she’d known all of her life wouldn’t see she’d come to this. It’s best Mom didn’t ask. Wallis knows it would have made her feel worse, reduced to being like plenty of women.
The door to Jasper’s room is closed but she hears voices, then the crash of glass breaking. Dad has not gone to bed, he is in there with Jasper, and they are arguing. Everything was easy before he came. She went to school and had friends and took piano lessons. Mom didn’t swallow pills, Dad still loved them. Wallis knows whose fault all this is. The voices abruptly cease and she draws back. Her father throws open the door and behind him she sees Jasper standing by the bed, his clothes dumped out on the floor, the lamp overturned on the dresser. He is breathing hard. Eddie’s face is set.
“That’s right, Eddie, walk away,” Jasper flings. “You’re so scared, you’re scary.”
Mom left a brightly colored newspaper circular on the table by Wallis’s cereal bowl. She put a check mark and a note next to a high, lacecollared shirt with pearl buttons. Would look lovely on you. For Jasper, she’s checked a green and white baseball shirt and a pair of Lee jeans. Jasper, darling, what size do you wear? Though it is still the middle of August, summer is over. She has already put them on the school bus and waved good-bye. Wallis walks to the refrigerator for milk and shivers in the cold. She didn’t use her air conditioner last night because after a week without it, it had felt like sleeping in a morgue.
